Former Haines Borough interim manager Bob Ward said this week he never expressed the sentiment that the borough shouldn’t tax citizens and then give that money to nonprofits, contrary to comments Mayor Jan Hill attributed to him last week.
Hill cited Ward last week when she revealed the assembly’s nonprofit funding committee had decided to keep the $14,000 the Haines Animal Rescue Kennel refused to accept. Hill reported that at the committee meeting, assembly member Mike Case recalled something Ward had said, and that Hill recalled it as well.
“One of the things that (Ward) stated was that the borough should not tax its citizens and then give that money to nonprofits. If the citizens want to donate money, they should do it directly to the ones that they care about the most,” Hill said.
That’s not the way Ward remembers it. “I have not said that,” Ward said this week from Umatilla, Ore., where he works as city manager. “I have no recollection of ever having said that.”
“It’s very heart-warming to discover that my couple of months working as an interim manager would have resulted in some long-term philosophical shift, but I just don’t think it happened that way,” Ward added.
Ward served as interim manager in Haines in 2008 and 2009.
What Ward did support, though, was not taxing people and keeping that money in reserves; which is, ironically, exactly what the nonprofit funding committee is recommending the assembly do with the $14,000. It wants to bank that money in the general fund, which carries a $2.8 million balance.
“I’ve always been a proponent that if you don’t need money, you lower taxes and if you need money, you raise taxes,” Ward said.
Hill’s comment raised the eyebrows of several community members, who did not recall Ward expressing the opinion that the borough shouldn’t give to nonprofits and that individuals should privately give to the ones they appreciate most.
“(Ward) said that it is unethical or inappropriate for a municipality to tax the public and then to set aside (not spend) the money, year to year – as Haines had done frequently – and to then strengthen its so called ‘rainy day fund’ with the proceeds,” said Big Brothers Big Sisters director Burl Sheldon.
“That is, if we raise $1 million through taxes, we need to spend $1 million, not stash in savings some remainder, left over due to penny pinching. If there remains a budget surplus, we must tax less in the coming fiscal year and return that remainder to the public in the form of lower future taxes. To my reckoning, that is what Bob Ward said.”
The assembly will take up the committee’s recommendation to bank the $14,000 on Tuesday.
HARK representatives had told former manager David Sosa during contract negotiations that they were not interested in using the $14,000 from the “community chest,” but Sosa failed to pass on that message when the assembly was deciding how to divvy up the funds it set aside for nonprofits.